Who Put the ‘Cold’ in Cold War?

Back in the mid-1970s, Natan Sharansky and his fellow Soviet dissidents bitterly amused themselves by conducting mock trials of Henry Kissinger, the architect of the détente policy that left them feeling abandoned. Sharansky, as judge, would sentence Kissinger to exile in the Soviet Union without benefit of the Jackson amendment, which pressured the Soviets to permit Jews to emigrate. One can scarcely imagine the punishment he would have meted out to George Kennan (1904-2005), the diplomat-scholar who laid the foundations for the cold war policy Kissinger later executed, and who, we learn from John Lukacs’s elegant and elegiac biography, sharply opposed “the American insistence that the Soviet Union facilitate emigration of its citizens in accord with some American preferences.” Sharansky would not have been surprised to learn that Kennan also felt “fairly at home” in Berlin in the years before America’s entry into World War II, and “regretted” our involvement in the war (though he later wrote that the Holocaust was sufficient reason to fight Germany).

Kennan’s unillusioned and often bleak assessment of America’s capacity to shape the world according to its wishes was, save for a brief period at the dawn of the cold war, too harsh a medicine for Washington’s policy makers to swallow. Americans, as Kennan was grimly aware, are enamored of their supposedly unique virtues and unique destiny. Indeed, Sharansky’s “Case for Democracy,” in which he tells the Kissinger anecdote, supposedly helped inspire George W. Bush to pursue a policy of democracy promotion, spreading those American virtues around the globe. Many of the president’s harshest detractors accept the legitimacy of this mission civilisatrice, even if they doubt the methods. Wilsonian idealism, as Kissinger himself once recognized, is America’s default foreign policy. Kennan’s “realism” — the policy of prudence and self-restraint — is the path usually not taken. What better time to rethink Kennan than now, when the American infatuation with noble adventures has come so utterly to grief?

Kennan is remembered today chiefly as the author of the “containment” doctrine, which shaped American policy toward the Soviet Union, and as a writer of lapidary prose. Lukacs, a distinguished historian of 20th-century Europe, makes very large claims for his subject in “George Kennan”: He was “a better writer and a better thinker” than Henry Adams; he was “the best and finest American writer about Europe” in the interwar years, better than Hemingway. These claims — well, the first one, anyway — may actually be true, though Lukacs, perhaps fearful of allowing Kennan’s magisterial prose to overwhelm his own, only fleetingly cites his work in the text; we are left more or less to take these claims on faith. Lukacs plainly reveres Kennan, whom he knew well, and admires his extraordinarily fine-grained and exacting sensibility — to the point where one can’t quite tell whether, for example, the dismissive allusion to “some American preferences” speaks of the subject’s contempt for a moralizing foreign policy, or of the author’s.

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Felix Sockwell

George Kennan was not a happy fellow. His mother died when he was an infant, and the stepmother who raised him was “nervous and cold.” His own disposition, from the outset, was solitary and melancholy. The great Protestant virtues — duty, discipline, self-denial — ran deep in him. And his penetrating and lucid intellect operated as a kind of acid bath for received wisdom. He saw Russia, his great subject, free from the dogmas of left and right. As early as 1938, he urged Americans to abandon “the hackneyed question of how far Bolshevism has changed Russia and turn our attention to the question of how far Russia has changed Bolshevism” — a question he would turn over and over for the next half century. Kennan yearned to have his wisdom accepted, but could not and would not fit his views to those of any party, or any large body of opinion. “He was not a progressive,” Lukacs writes; and his visionary pessimism ensured his solitude.

Lukacs artfully braids the life and the work in this consciously old-fashioned “study of character.” He is honest about Kennan’s defects of thought; and yet he seems unwilling fully to accept what they imply about the man’s nature. Kennan made no secret of his low regard for the wisdom of the common man, and thus for the practice of a so-called democratic, as opposed to a professional, foreign policy. But Lukacs also notes that in the late ’30s — as Hitler’s Germany rose to power — Kennan began writing a book proposing that America adopt a more authoritarian model of government in which both immigration and suffrage would be curtailed. Kennan could not bring himself to despise Germany before, during or after the war. He was, on the other hand, “enraged” by Washington’s clumsy attempt to acquire bases in the Azores. The predicament of ordinary people seems not to have moved him much. Lukacs quotes Kennan’s own memoirs to the effect that when the Wehrmacht marched into Prague, Kennan, then serving as a high-ranking diplomat, turned away the desperate Americans, “including a Jewish acquaintance,” who came to the American legation. Lukacs characterizes this nonchalance as “cold,” not “callous.” Is there a difference?

Lukacs believes that the kind of traditionalist, dry-eyed philosophy that Kennan practiced and elaborated was not simply a set of propositions about the correct management of America’s position in the world, but a temperament — an alternative way of being American. And this seems right. Along with Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr and the other postwar realists, Kennan was imbued with a sense of humility before our own limits, and of respect for the views and the peculiarities of others. Of these archaic virtues the booming ideologues of the Bush administration show no trace. But perhaps we need to pursue this question of character a little further. After all, a low opinion of mankind, or a plain lack of sympathy for the mass of men, makes it easier to counsel restraint in the face of gross injustice. Similarly, a deeply ingrained pessimism makes inaction look wiser than action. Darfur? Best not. Kennan was fond of John Quincy Adams’s observation that Americans “do not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” But sometimes we do; and the force that impels us to do so (the situation in Iraq notwithstanding) is not an ignoble one. We do, of course, need to do a better job of picking our monsters.

In his heyday, Kennan was despised by the left for his insistence that the Soviet Union be treated as a threat, not a potential ally. But as the nation was gripped by militant anti-Communism, Kennan became persona non grata in Washington, for he just as resolutely viewed the Soviet Union as a manageable threat, not an evil empire. The yahooism he had always despised was suddenly yoked to an ideology he viewed as reckless. And it was at this moment, when he went, in effect, into opposition, that the true greatness of Kennan’s character emerged. In May 1953, when Joseph McCarthy stood at the height of his power and few men dared oppose him, Kennan gave a speech at the University of Notre Dame that Lukacs reproduces in full (in an appendix). The rabid anti-Communists, he said, “impel us — in the name of our salvation from the dangers of Communism — to many of the habits of thought and action which our Soviet adversaries, I am sure, would like to see us adopt. ... I have lived more than 10 years of my life in totalitarian countries. I know where this sort of thing” — the demand that Americans prove their loyalty by denouncing Communism — “leads. I know it to be the most shocking and cynical disservice one can do to the credulity and to the spiritual equilibrium of one’s fellow men.” That is what courage used to sound like.

Correction: May 13, 2007

A review on April 29 about “George Kennan: A Study of Character,” by John Lukacs, referred incorrectly to the people whom Kennan, as part of his diplomatic duties in Prague, turned away from the American legation there in March 1939 when the Germans entered the city. They were various inhabitants of Prague, not Americans.

James Traub is the author of “The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the U.N. in the Era of American World Power.” He is currently working on a book about democracy promotion.